Testing opportunities should be a forethought, not an afterthought to your marketing plan
Are you leveraging testing opportunities in your marketing plan as part of your innovation strategy? Your company may have an R+D pipeline bursting at the seams, but are you doing your part to future proof how to successfully bring those brands to market? In this blog post, we outline 3 key reasons you should implement marketing testing today to stay ahead of the competition and on a trajectory toward improving your bottom line tomorrow.
1) Test to know where you are today.
If you don’t already have benchmarks to guide your marketing decisions, then today is the day to establish them. Everything in today’s world is data driven. So if you don’t have data as a foundation, then which direction are you driving? With a goal to always keep improving, you need to know where you are starting from in order to cross the finish line. At a bare minimum, basic testing and reporting provides benchmarks that serve as guidelines for future endeavors. To help, we created a tip sheet to help you develop marketing benchmarks. You can download them here.
2) Test to learn, rather than test and learn.
It is imperative that all testing begin with a strategic marketing objective that ties back to the business objective. The question you need to answer is what are you trying to accomplish? Are you seeking incremental gain? Higher ROI? Or do you need more conversions? When you tell your agency to test and learn, it sounds like your direction is “let’s try something new and see what we might be able to ascertain on the back end of the campaign.” There is no specific communications or business objective behind it, so finding a conclusion can be like finding the needle in the proverbial haystack. Test to learn begins with a specific question that can and should be measured outside of your other KPIs. For example, if your goal is marketing penetration, the question to ask is: “Can we achieve superior market penetration via connected TV versus local TV in this given geographic footprint?” This allows you to determine which tactic will most efficiently meet your goals. And when partnered with other datapoints, such as CPM, audience targeting capabilities and quality of programming, your future decisions will be backed by data.
A test to learn policy ensures calculated risk management in your marketing by allocating a set percentage of the budget at a low risk today to get answers that could reap high rewards tomorrow.
3) Test to innovate for future proofing your brand and your company.
Small wins today are good, but long-term accelerated and sustainable growth should be a key driver for identifying testing opportunities and KPIs in your marketing plan. Such opportunities could run the gamut from testing new channel and tactical entrants in media, to weighing the effectiveness of copy and content in ads, to supporting company-wide goals like offsetting scope 3 carbon emissions for corporate sustainability. The key to choosing what to test depends on your future needs. Keep in mind that testing should be built with the option to quickly increase scale in market to capitalize on success.
Market leaders understand that tomorrow’s growth and success depends on today’s innovation. Innovation is simply applying new ideas and technology to existing problems for better solutions. That means testing to learn is the original optimization strategy. This is why it should be a critical part of your marketing plan development with its own budget allocation, objectives and KPIs. Testing needs dedicated support. A continuous and proactive approach to experimentation ensures your brand will be nimble enough to capitalize on the newest audience trends and technological advancements to help your business thrive.
Continue to learn more about using data to make smart marketing decisions. Check out our blog post that outlines four steps to make the most of the marketing data you are collecting.
Interested in learning more about how measurement can help drive growth? We would love to talk to you. Contact our Business Development Director today.